Is Bad Visual Branding Turning Away Potential Customers?

It’s a chilling thought, isn’t it? You work so hard to make sure that every area of your restaurant is thriving, but you may be turning away potential customers with poor visual branding.

Your brand identity is often the first touchpoint with potential customers. Before they taste your food, experience your service, or step foot in your environment, they will see your branding. Your exterior signage, website, and social media presence are often the first encounters with your brand. They will form an opinion from that first impression.

It is vitally important to make sure that you are representing yourself accurately, creatively, and consistently. Your visual branding must pique interest and instill trust in order to earn the opportunity to make them a loyal customer.

Here are five mistakes that can turn away potential customers:

Poor Quality

People do judge books by their covers — especially today’s visually-driven consumer. How a potential customer perceives your restaurant will be influenced by the quality of your brand visuals. Does your brand show that you put great care and effort into what you do? Does it instill trust? Or was it done in a hurry and with little thought?

Developing an effective brand identity is one of the best investments you can make. Hire a professional designer or team to develop your brand visuals. You get what you pay for. If it’s cheap, it will show.

Brands that are intentional with a strong visual design stand out and pique interest. If you give the wrong first impression with poor quality branding, you may miss out on the chance to win a loyal customer.

Wrong Message

Have you ever seen a logo that completely misrepresented the company? There is a construction company I pass on my way to work whose logo communicates the wrong message. It’s a nice looking logo, but instead of communicating “Trustworthy Construction Contractor.” it says “Expensive Brazilian Restaurant.” This is an extreme example, but we see this in subtle ways all the time.

Check out this example:
Besides making you hungry for a burger, the above example shows you how your perception of quality, style, and price is affected by a simple typeface change. When you consider adding color, size, and other variations, you can really see how much visuals impact our perception.

Our brains pick up on so many subtle cues when processing images. A professional designer will know how to leverage these nuances to help tell your story accurately. Who is your target audience? What makes you unique? Make sure that your visual branding communicates who you are to the right audience.